Of the languages listed in the TIOBE index, Python was the fastest growing programming language of 2010. The scripting language was therefore crowned language of the year in the January edition of the index of popular programming languages.

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You don't need to be a genius to debug a pf.conf firewall ruleset, you just need the guts to run tcpdump

These sorts of surveys are horrible for trying to answer a simple question many of us would like to see answered without having any credible ability to answer said question. Still, nice to see Lisp is perhaps growing in popularity. Heck, according to this there's more than 1/3 as much Lisp activity as Perl activity. I credit Conrad Barski. Or is this Clojure appearing in their hype index?

They are good for management/corporate types. I've been pushing the use of Python at my work for a number of years now. My director read that before me and brought it to my attention.

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"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." -Philip K. Dick

Good for fooling them? Good for you since it happens to promote the language you want your boss to feel comfortable with? This "study" tells only what has the most search engine hits more or less. Even their efforts to avoid false positives seem completely casual. Where in their description of their methods do they do anything to account for the fact that Java, Python, and Lisp are all common words, for instance? Or what if it were the case (I think likely given one of Larry Wall's state of the union addresses) that a Python programmer will say he does Python programming but a Perl programmer may often say he does Perl scripting.

TIOBE borders on fraud with the sort of confidence they project based on results that are almost as frivolous as the bsdstats project. Even the name TIOBE, it sounds like something you'd see in chapter 7 of a textbook on regression analysis. It's all a load of crap if you ask me. They even note a huge artifact in their Java data a few years caused only by a change in Google's indexing.

We all know that the popular scripting languages are Perl, Python, Ruby and PHP (at least on non-windows platforms) and that the popular C based OO languages C++, C#, and Java. TIOBE adds hardly a smidgen of information for us.

Your boss would be better off taking a random sample of resumes he receives and seeing what people list on them.

That rantesque post also failed to point out, that if search results are being measured, isn't that a bad thing?

e.g. higher search results for language X -> possibly less skilled programmers "Googling it" or the appearance that it is just So Damn Hard it's not a positive ROI?

At least for me, most times I run a search related to a given language, it's usually for one of two things: trying to find a library or trying to find where the documentation for doing XYZ happens to be.